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12 February 2017

Silence

Somewhere outside of Susenji, the neighbourhood on the edge
of Fukuoka where I first lived in Japan, there was a beach that I found one afternoon when I went
looking for the ocean. On one end, there was a grove of pines and
a shrine — a red gate opening out into the water. And on the other, there was a
small mountain. I would park my bike and walk up and down it, or stop sometimes
to study Chinese characters and try to pray, my back against a concrete wall.
There was the water in front of me. If I swam out, I thought, I would
eventually make landfall in the States. It was silent — I would pray and look out into the distance before giving up and going home.

The silence had followed me from the States, from elementary
school when I had prayed again and again for salvation and never heard anything.
One night, when our youth group had been on a retreat, there was a worship
service that everyone said had been particularly meaningful, that the spirit of
the Lord had been there. I remember saying, yes, it was there, I felt it, but
that had been a lie — I had sung and reached out and tried, but it wasn’t there.
People were crying and I felt nothing, but the need to say, Here I am, send me. We were told to say
that, by men in polo shirts and khaki trousers, holding guitars and praying. Here I am, send me. At Devil’s Head
in Wisconsin on another retreat, I had been sent away from a van in the car
park by our youth pastor, a fiery man with red hair. We were to
practice the spiritual discipline of silence. I sat on a rock and tried to be
silent, to not think of my girlfriend who had come on the retreat too and had
also been sent away from the van, somewhere in the woods, wearing a one piece blue bathing suit with stars underneath her clothes. I tried not to think
about it, to sit and say it, Lord, send
me. Send me.

When I went to spread the word of God, to Kyushu, 400 years
after the Portuguese, Japan was precisely the swamp for Christian belief Cristóvão
Ferreira said it was. Christianity cannot take root because there is no
cultural context for it. There is no word for a Christian god. The Japanese Christians are anomalies; the true
believers were the worst — a group of theology students from Tokyo building
a fire at a summer camp and telling the kids they would burn in hell if they
didn’t convert. The children cried and prayed for forgiveness — they didn't want to burn. I remembered this last night as I watched the Scorsese film —
the fire pyres in the film where they burnt the Christians in Nagasaki looked
like the one the Christians had built that night in the camp. I remember being
told about the conversions, the morning after it happened, and being shocked —
this isn’t something we do, this isn’t what we are supposed to do, I said, but
the Japanese believers reassured me it was okay. I fell into despair over it, over the whole concept of hell: what was my
belief anyway. I sat on my futon in the concrete apartment building, the sounds
of the city outside, waiting in the silence. Here I am. I’ve come. Why is it still silent.

Ferreira became an apostate after five hours of torture,
although they say that he recanted after many years and died a martyr. What does it matter
though. At some point, it becomes clear that what you hear in your head is from
inside of you. It can’t be anything else. When there is silence, you don’t have
the answer. You can tell yourself a story, but you are just papering the silence.
It is only silence. My apostasy didn’t lead to anyone’s freedom, it didn’t stop
any torture. I got on a plane and flew away from Kyushu, deeper into the swamp.
Whatever truth I had before, Japan took it away from me. I had just been lied
to by people that didn’t know they were lying. There is just silence.